Experts of Experience - Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Are traditional metrics like ROI failing to capture the true value of experience? Sujay Saha, President of Acquis Cortico-X, challenges the status quo and argues for a new framework: return on experience. He explains why focusing solely on monetary returns can be detrimental and how a broader perspective can lead to sustainable success. Plus, Sujay debunks common myths surrounding AI in the workplace and discusses how to approach digital transformation with a values-driven mindset.Tune in to learn:Tune in to learn:00:00 Introduction to Customer Experience01:49 The Evolution of Customer Experience04:24 Key Metrics Surrounding CX Investment05:32 Implementing Return on Experience (ROX)08:38 Challenges in CX Metrics10:03 Creating a Bespoke Measurement System14:46 The Role of Leadership in Experience16:20 Diagnosing Organizational Maturity23:17 High Ground vs. Low Ground Thinking25:41 The Importance of Aligned Purpose 34:59 Curating AI According to Your Values41:10 A Personal Experience With an Impressive CX Team46:23 Key Advice for CX Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their strategies with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org

A lot of times customer experience is seen as a fluffy topic. Leaders, they just don't understand the value. I feel that it is not the leader's problem, it is their problem. I, along with a few of the colleagues in the past, have come up with a concept called return on experience, a holistic approach that considers the broader value of customer experience. ROCKS ultimately indicates that the customers are satisfied or not, how likely are they to recommend the brand,

how are the customers engaging positively or not. Hello everyone and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today we are going to dive into the keyword of this show, experience. We are joined by Sujay Saha, the founder and president of Acquis Cortico X, a boutique experience led strategy and transformation firm. We are going to dive into Sujay's insights around experience and driving innovation through a human-centric lens.

Let's get into it. Sujay, wonderful to have you on the show. Same here, Lauren. Very excited to be talking about the topic that I talk about every night and day. Amazing. Well, as you know, this is my favorite topic. And I'd love to just kick it off by talking a little bit about. Employee and customer experience, I know this is something that you talk about

all day, every day at work with your clients. It's a key focus of what you do at Cortico X. Tell us a little bit about at a high level, how do you approach this topic? Absolutely. In fact, if you would allow, I would probably take a bit of a historical view into because I've been around in the consulting space, working with organizations for more than two decades at this point in time. Back in the days, it used to be a topic that felt very foreign in certain ways in the

organization. And we had to really bring in that lens to talk about it. But over the years, I would say particularly in the last decade or so, it has become a thing that the organizations know that they need to be focused on. In fact, they have real big functional areas created for those. They have folks on the table who have titles that have experience embedded all over. In fact, at this point in time, I would say that a lot of times for us,

it's the other way around where we have to almost dig in deeper to understand, do you really own experience? Or do you have a title around experience? It's a very popular word. It's a very popular word. So you would see a lot of, for instance, customer service centers and organizations that call themselves

as customer experience centers. I appreciate the notion of it. I do think like when we think about the responsibilities within the organization around who is guiding the charter of driving that discipline within the organization versus who is the front-bearer of the experience that you're delivering to the customers, they're different. For us, a lot of times,

it starts with the stakeholder with whom we are talking. If we are talking to folks who are manifesting a lot of these disciplines, what I would call at the enterprise level, to make it real for the customers and employees, we talk to them in a different way around like, hey, how are you thinking about driving the value with the efforts that you're putting,

and how is that translating into real world experiences that you're creating versus when we are talking at the center and a lot of times like the enterprises have functions like chief experience office and chief experience office is essentially like a lot of times like a view of not necessarily the folks who are delivering the experience at the forefront of it, but are the ones who are curators of discipline, are the curators of, call it like, the energy within the organization to drive those on the frontline.

We work and talk to them in a different way to kind of talk about like, how do you cascade that discipline and energy within the organization itself? And I'm curious to know, one of the biggest things that I find as I work with companies on their experience, both their employee experience and their customer experiences, is it's not always easy to tell what is the ROI of investing in this. We know inherently that if a customer has a great experience, they're more likely to come back.

We know inherently that if an employee has a great experience at their job, they're more likely to stay. But it's not always easy to be able to say, if we do this, we will have this revenue impact. And I'm sure that your customers wonder this. So how do you approach that topic? Absolutely. I would draw the parallel is how do you essentially impress the CFO that this is an important initiative. This is an important set of initiatives. So this is an important anchor

in your set of initiatives that you need to be driving towards. ROI in itself is like a well-accepted term, as you can imagine, in the organizational world. So everybody is looking for it. I, along with a few of the colleagues in the past, have come up with a concept called return on experience, pretty much to kind of head and answer exactly the question that you're asking. We nickname it as ROCKS.

So ROCKS is a holistic approach that considers the broader value of customer experience such as brand loyalty, think about customer retention, think about advocacy. How do you bring all of that together into not necessarily a singular metric, but a singular view of all of these metrics together? It really focuses while the ROI, in my opinion, gets very unidimensional, in my opinion, around thinking about monetary returns.

Rocks is a dynamic company-wide metric that connects necessarily customer experience to employee experience and considers the investments in relatively what I would call intangible initiatives or the initiatives that a lot of times have a difficulty in proving the ROI immediately, like organizational culture, sometimes even aspects of analytics and technology that are necessarily more like the enablers of what you are driving versus the end result of what you are driving.

ROCKs ultimately really indicates that the customers are satisfied or not, how likely are they to recommend the brand, how are the customers engaging, positively or not so with you. In particular, I would add that there is like this whole notion of experience management sub-industry within this, which has been very popular and particularly it has become popular because of some of the technologies that have been out there in the market that have been bringing it on the forefront,

which is around like, how do you measure experiences? How do you manage those by disseminating the insights within the organization and driving a lot of that. That has created an opportunity for a set of these measures and metrics under the larger umbrella of return on experience, ROCKS, that can really help the organization in getting the right pulse on what is going right,

what is going wrong, where do I fine-tune certain drivers of what matters, and connect those to financial goals ultimately, so I don't want to lose that. So the ultimate outcomes, how do you connect those to financial goals, ultimately. So I don't want to lose that. So the ultimate outcomes, how do you connect those? And once you connect those, now you are able to create an engine and run the engine, fueling different parts of the engine so that everybody gets a good understanding

of why they are investing in certain initiatives to improve certain metrics, which ultimately helps in improving the monetary outcomes that we are looking for. But not necessarily just looking at monetary outcomes, in my opinion, in vacuum, without understanding the implications and connections to. So these are the measures.

Yeah. Well, the thing about experience in general, whether it is inside the organization or outside of the organization, is it is complex in nature, and it is inside the organization or outside of the organization, is it is complex in nature. And it is also emotional. It is not something that we can draw a direct line to revenue as we can if we say, you know, we're going to have X number of sales calls this month, and that's going to drive X amount of revenue. Like it's not a simple equation. And so I think it's really fascinating how you're acknowledging the complexity, but also

the fact that we need transparency in seeing where our efforts are going and how they are driving the business forward and the ways the business wants to grow. And I think it's one of the reasons why experienced leaders, one, tend to be quite siloed, but two, have a difficult time really communicating to the key stakeholders in the business why it's important to invest in more experienced-led initiatives or human-led initiatives that we all know will help the business, but it's just hard to draw that direct line. And so I'm curious when you create the return on experience, when you go into an organization and you're presenting that, is it bespoke to the individual business and the metrics

that you're pulling together to really create that number? Or do you have a general, maybe templated approach that you kind of always apply? We do have a templated approach around the structure of these measures and metrics to kind of come together. So it's not like understanding all the way from starting from like, what are their goals? What are your outcomes to understanding everything and everything? But we, but ultimately the measurement system that we put together is definitely bespoke to the organization. There are certain measures and metrics which are very, very popular, which I would call like the North Star within the experience world. Some of those, I'm pretty sure most of our audiences who are hearing this know about it as like Net Promoter Score. You hear about

customer satisfaction, you hear about employee satisfaction, you hear about employee satisfaction, you hear about customer effort scores. So there are some of those kind of measures and metrics and it's a very popular question that I a lot of times get asked around like, which measure or metric do you pick? Do you pick one and then you kind of run with it? And maybe my unpopular answer to that is that, you know what, it doesn't matter to me. Honestly, if we have seen it, we have seen it in action at like actually a top five bank where we ran an analysis for these literally these three metrics that they used to measure all of them.

And we ran an analysis to see like, what are the drivers of the improvement of all of them. And we ran an analysis to see like what are the drivers of the improvement of all of these three metrics. We didn't see much of a difference across the board. Definitely not substantial enough for us to warrant that they need to be measuring these three because now you're burdening the system to be understanding and comprehending and analyzing and all of that, let alone creating a chaos in the organization that there are three measures and metrics that matter to you and everybody trying to create their bespoke stories of success using anything that works for them.

Pick one. And once we pick that, a lot of those bespoke measures and metrics that I was talking to you about gets created around that. We broadly categorize it in five dimensions. One of those dimensions is around pride. So it's essentially the emotional commitment of the organization to brand purpose and strategy,

which is, as you know, like, purpose is like very close to my personal heart, like around how do you create that pride for being in that organization, right? The second is influencers. How do you create an internal and external brand, what I'd call the rallying cry around that purpose? Why do people want to shop with you?

Why do people want to bank with you? Why do people want to work for you and with you? And then this leads a lot of times into the behaviors, the critical positive habits and actions that really define the culture, the drive excellence, need to be embedded into really the performance management, essentially. And then, which turns into a lot of like value drivers

for the organization, which you would imagine not every time can you track the metric like, hey, were we able to make X million dollars of sale? You may not be able to get to that, but what are the drivers of that that can get you to that? It could be the sales pipeline, it could be the quality of sales pipeline, a lot of those. So the key sources of the value in the eyes of customers

and employees that really matter to them, those are the drivers that we connect. And ultimately, the fifth dimension is the outcome. So it's pride, influences, behaviors, value drivers, and outcomes. Those are the five categories that I would say. And sometimes these five become four, five becomes six. But the idea is we start there

and help the organization go through the journey with us to create something which they feel like this is my own, because we have created for a success of our own organization in that way. What would you recommend to our listeners? Obviously, if they could work with you, that's great. But I think this is a... We're unpacking a problem that I know so many CX leaders and also HR leaders struggle with

in really being able to communicate the impact of what they're doing. And where do we start? How can we start to really communicate that impact and show the return on investment? I say the first thing to start with is to really diagnose where the organization really is in terms of the maturity of even understanding this concept. In my opinion, one thing that we haven't brought in up until now is leadership, right? In fact, if it's okay, I'll take like a quick detour and come back to your question.

Please. One of my favorite topics. Exactly. So we very intuitively understand that customer and employee experience are very related. Emotional engagement among the employees tends to produce a higher customer engagement, right? This is like a very known fact. Hundreds of analysis out there, people will probably not even debate on that, right? But what a lot of times organizations miss in looking at is how do you enable your leaders to be able to create this flywheel effect that you're trying to create? If good CX is a trajectory of appealing touch points, in a good employee experience is like a social movement

in the way it inspires commitment. If we bring in the lens of leadership experience, which I'm talking about could be in like multiple layers, this good leadership experience is actually a catalyst for the rest of the enterprise. What leaders learn has the direct impact on the quality of employee and customer experience. Because everything that the senior leaders say and do,

as you know, is amplified to the entire organization as employees respond and comment. And those gets translated into your behaviors and your products and solutions that you end up creating for your customers. Now coming back to your question around, where should you start? I would recommend the organizations

to look at where are they in this maturity of understanding this flywheel effect around customer employee and leadership experience. And I'm pretty certain all the successful organizations would find that they are something is their strength. Either they have coincidentally created such an empowered leadership that they are able to work the system in such a way that they create such effective customer experience through products and solutions and whatnot, sometimes at even the expense of employee experience, but they end up creating it. There is an opportunity for them to create this flywheel effect in such a way that they can create even a more sustainable organization in the future. And I think I can go with the permutations and combinations of all of these in similar

way that they may see like, hey, they have great customer and employee experience where employees are actually bending backwards to take care of certain things from the customer standpoint because they just feel it, they have it in their DNA in certain ways. But the leadership is not necessarily all the time aligned, it's relatively more dysfunctional, it quickly changes, it quickly turns around, which creates frustration, but the employees are so proud of the products

that they've created that they continue to kind of run. So answering your question directly, I think it's really looking at how do you diagnose the system and the virtual cycle that I'm talking about, customer employee and leadership experience. Start there and then identify the gaps over there to come with where do you want to go and invest in, and how do you want to dig deeper

into which can then get into the measures and metrics that I was talking about. If we can get deeper into that, that helps you and that would likely help the organization in thinking about what kind of initiatives do we have got going? Do we have the right measures and metrics? Do we see these measures and metrics at least a proxy

to some of these, what I would call like the visual dashboard of ROX? Are they able to connect to that? So there is an opportunity, didn't necessarily lay out what I would call the visual dashboard of ROX, are they able to connect to that? There is an opportunity, didn't necessarily lay out as simply as you would want, but I would say if I have to really summarize it, it's a three-step process.

Step number one, think about diagnosing it within customer employee and leadership experience and where are the hot points. Second, each of these areas try to map it to what are the measures and metrics that you have today so that you get a holistic point of view. And third, think about like, hey, as you operationalize something like this, it's a huge change, huge effort within the organization.

Where do you lack? Where do you need to double down so that you have like a right engine? So if you have the right engine over here, then I'm pretty sure the initiatives and opportunities can be tweaked around and run in the right way. Say goodbye to chatbots and say hello to the first AI agent. Agent Force Service Agent makes self-service an actual joy for your customers with its conversational language anytime on any channel.

To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash agent force. I'm so happy that you bring up the concept of leadership experience because at the end of the day, it starts with the leaders. And especially when we think about employee and customer experience, those are usually owned by individual leaders that are a part of a greater whole. I find the ability for the leadership team to collaborate cross-functionally, to understand the needs and challenges and pain points of one another, to be on the same team, directly

impacts the ability for the employees to feel safe, for the employees to feel heard, for the employees to feel connected to the business, and then also be able to then go on and create that for the customer. And that leadership component is just so incredibly vital. And I know we talk, I think every leader knows the importance of great leadership, but it is not that often put on the table as a key point of focus.

And it's the reason why I became a leadership coach myself because as I went and sought coaching, because I knew I needed to step up in terms of my leadership. I saw that connection and I was like, oh, okay, I'm not getting I'm not going to get this from my organization. So I'm going to go and pay and get someone to help me from the outside. But I think that it's it's something that executive teams really need to think about is how are we leveling up and how are we supporting our leaders to be the face of

the organization and to inspire the organization and to connect the organization? I think it's just such an incredible point here and leadership experience isn't something I talk about that often but you are gonna send me on a rant now because it's a big one. No, I can completely relate to that, Lauren. And it's great that there are folks like you who are focused on that, right? And it's, as you can say, leadership coaches, I love the concept of leadership coaches and people like yourselves who are driving this. In my view, there is an entire opportunity

for organizations to think about creating that kind of a buzz in form of coaching, in form of translating into a momentum, which is an ongoing momentum within the organization around leadership development, leadership achievement, thinking about how do you continuously create leaders within the organization to drive that thinking to move on? In fact, if I may add another color to it,

I was partnering in one of my previous years with a couple of neuroscientists, because I get sometimes geeky about some of these things. We love it. We love it. We love it. How do leaders make certain decisions? And we hear about something called organizational politics. There's so many people in the organization.

I'm pretty sure you have a lot of friends. I definitely have a ton of friends. They say, ah, can't work here, man. Organizational politics, can't bear it. I think I don't want to. In fact, people who take complete right turns in their career, and they're like, hey, you know what? I don't think this corporate world is for me.

I'd rather do X, Y, and Z. People leave their entire career and start to go in other directions. Or some people who want to now become an agent of change. I'm not sure what is your story there, but there are people who go down that path around like, you know what, let me build help in building leaders in thinking, having them think because they wanna leave their mark in the larger world

to have these organizations get on a right path. So in my collaboration with some of these neuroscientists, we started to dig in and the concept that came out very clearly to me, I've also published a little bit about some of this with my previous collaborators, around the thinking around high and low ground thinking. So what that means is I will simplify it. In a lot of moments of choice where leaders have to make decisions, they think about two paths, transactional, strategic.

Hey, if I give away this $1 million budget to my senior leader who is asking me to give away some budget, it's going to get me in his or her good books, right? It will show my enterprise thinking. A high ground approaches a lot of times, hey, you know what, I don't think I have any dollars left here. Even if I may not be seen as an enterprise thinker, let me take a step back and think

about the larger organization, think about the larger organization, think about the larger mandate over here and defend why I cannot give even any dollar into this. And they come with like, I'm not saying like one way or the other that's protecting money is high ground thinking, but in this example, if you treat it in that way, then that's like thinking about putting yourself at risk a little bit, potentially putting yourself in a position of vulnerability where you may be seen as not an enterprise leader who is contributing, but you're coming up with the sense of purpose that it doesn't make sense to cut

into the muscle of my part of the function, which is so critical and important relative to everything else and bringing in that. Right. And I feel like there's so much of empowerment more than training that is needed for the leaders to feel that it's okay to have that high ground thinking in a lot of cases. And there are certain place, not everywhere do you want like a lot of like strategic thinking, some places you just wanna continue to kind of move on.

So I'm not saying like high ground is always the way to go, but it would be nice for us to propagate this concept and have people understand that, hey, right now I'm thinking in a high ground, whatever you want to call it, I'm thinking in a strategic way for the organization. And that's what brings in, Lauren, I know that you and I can jam probably for hours about the concept of purpose in an organization. So when you talk about high ground and strategic,

you can't anchor the strategic to be around another $20 million that I can get you for the business. It needs to be sent, it should be going all the way to the impact that is indisputable. And if the organization is setting up a sense of purpose that I exist, like for instance, an insurance company that says I exist in this business because I want to give my insureds an opportunity to make,

do anything in their business without having to worry about a heyday. That is very powerful. And a lot of times organizations have that at the highest level, but it doesn't get translated down. It doesn't get cascaded down into the organization. So if there is a sense of what we could do over there, that could help in having everybody, all these leaders be able to think in a high ground setting and connect

it back to the impact. I want to make sure that I understand here. Can you define one more time for us high ground thinking versus low ground thinking? In the simplest way, I'd say high ground thinking is strategic thinking connected to a sense of purpose or outcome. Low ground thinking is transactional thinking, thinking about what's right in the moment right now for me to make as I make this decision. Got it. And we are constantly moving between those two things frequently. And I think there's also a level of skill in terms of being able to move between the two from the high level to the kind of being up in the clouds, strategic

thinking where are we going and then in the weeds, what are we doing right now? How are you making these specific actions take place and all of that? Brene Brown has a really great concept of going from the balcony to the dance floor and how leaders need to be really good at being able to move from that high level thinking also down to where their team might be at in thinking about specific strategic decisions. And I hope that that's all connected to what you're saying.

100%, 100% Lauren. In fact, I was in one of the master classes where Indra Nooyi, who I admire quite a bit, she was talking about how she ran such a big company across the board. She would go all the way down to the level of understanding why are we not making enough money about the bottles that we are manufacturing and bring it all the way up to talking about, do we really have the right

set of products stack across the board? And this is where that purpose piece comes in as well, because I'm fortunate enough to have worked at companies where there was a very strong sense of purpose, where there was a very clear mission, where we were working to help people or the environment. And it's the reason why I joined those companies in the first place. But especially as organizations grow and investment becomes, or profit becomes more important, I find that there can be this trade-off.

And when you get down into the weeds of what you are doing day to day, it can be difficult to connect that sense of purpose and keep that sense of purpose. If you are, for example, in a customer success team saying, okay, we need to sell more, we need to upsell our customers, we need to make more revenue, whether it is good for the customer or not.

And the employee is like, but wait, aren't we here to help people? And so why am I trying to sell them something that they don't necessarily need just so that we can increase our NRR and and I think that it's really important for leaders to help their teams tie back to that purpose and to make decisions from that purpose place as well because often I find purpose is like a nice to have where profit is a must and those two things should

actually not be separate because the purpose will drive the profit. But often we feel like profit comes first and then we'll talk about purpose once we achieve that profit. Yeah, I completely agree. And if you would see, I would say from a purpose of a CEO, from the vantage point of the CEO, high ground is looking at purpose at all times. There are times when you are, hey, I have a meeting with the shareholder. I have to talk about why my bottom line

is not looking that great. Yes, you have to get to the low ground of explaining in the moment of like what is happening. What are some of the choices that you have made that has turned into what the numbers are, but quickly connected back in the high ground to what is the impact that you've created or what is the loss of impact that you could have created for which you need an investment even in bad times, right? Like, and make some bets in those certain areas. So I completely agree with you around the sense of purpose

and how do you translate that down below so that everybody gets to feel it. Otherwise it's just like a great art piece in the headquarters and doesn't translate into something very effective across the organization. And it's something that we need to repeat over and over and over again. I know a lot of the leaders I coach, they'll be like, well, I told my team that this is why we're doing it.

And they still don't seem to get it. And at the end of the day, the human brain doesn't always remember those things, especially when it feels disconnected. And we need to consistently message. And I always like to think of every colleague we have is also a customer in some way. We need to understand them. We need to show that we understand them.

And then we need to present things in a way that is proving what's in it for them. This is the essence of influence, right? And when we talk about purpose, it is not a one and done thing. When we are changing culture, it is not like we do one thing and culture changes. It takes time. It takes nurturing. It takes repetition. It takes multiple, coming from multiple angles to really experience

something different so that we embody it and we take that forward. And I think when it comes to purpose, it is, it really needs to be an obsession by everyone in a leadership position, it really needs to be an obsession by everyone in a leadership position. And they have to be obsessed with ruthlessly asking, does this connect to that purpose? And how do we make sure that it does so that we can stay true to our values and be authentic in what we're doing? Because if you are not aligned with your purpose in taking actions and that inauthenticity

is present, people feel it, people doubt you, trust will be broken. We have to stay true and authentic to our purpose. I completely agree with you. And what you said, the word around obsession, that in itself, I know Amazon at one point of time started to talk about customer obsession and obsession became a thing because a lot of companies follow Amazon as the place where they want to create, not in terms of everything, but in terms of that obsession to create products and solutions and everything around it. How do you make obsession a reality? I think you said it around repeating over and over again,

which I would classify as definition, definition to the level of crispness of the purpose that people can relate to it. So define. Second is measure. Don't just leave it at definition. Like calculate that impact that you're creating. Come back and share it, share the examples of how folks are creating it at different points in the organization, different parts of the organization at different levels of the organization. And third is implication. If you see somebody or a part of the organization

is doing that really well and connecting it to the sense of purpose, implications create, recognize that, right? And if there are parts of organizations that are not getting it, have certain implications that actually help the organization see how important that is. You can't just, otherwise,

you may be saying certain things over and over again, which has no connection down to anything that you ever do. Both of us have seen many organizations where the leader is talking about all of these big things that they want to accomplish, but all they talk about is profitability and not talk about impact. Candidly speaking, I, as the leader of my own organization, I have to keep myself almost like on a check at all times

because it's easy to get distracted. Even though I talk about it and I do this for my living, I have to myself think about like, hey, when I talk to my team, am I talking about impact? Am I talking about the amplification? Is that evident in a lot of my decision making? Am I always thinking about profitability or I'm thinking about how do I have a really

happy client who leaves even if we don't end up making any money in that one? It's something we have to live and breathe. So before we run out of time here, I want to talk about how we bring all of this into the concept of AI, because I see a lot of leaders making difficult decisions or feeling the pressure to have AI as part of their businesses or utilize AI or make these investments. And I think especially as we think about purpose, it's so incredibly important that we are approaching AI from a values-driven place. What is it that we really are looking to get from this technology? How can we use it in a way that is still aligned with our purpose and our values? And I'm curious to get your take as we talk about

digital transformation, how organizations can keep that sense of purpose as we embark on a whole new way of working? Absolutely. As AI comes in, I mean, one very clear one that comes to our mind, one point that comes really clearly in our mind is around ethical AI, thinking about like, how do you leverage AI in an ethical way so that you do it right. But more than that, I will try to focus my response to your question around how do you drive more value using AI. There are a few myths in the organization and I'll classify those into five myths that we see typically. Organizations battling with, let's do the basics first.

We'll take care of the AI later. Well, AI is an accelerator, and it can help you in taking care of even the basics very quickly and fast. So don't completely ignore the trend. This is for a few organizations that may be in that bucket. And then a lot of times, organizations are into one thing at a time.

Let me identify a use case. Let me put some monies and energy towards that use case. And once that is successful, I will go to the next thing. The fact is that the whole concept of generative AI is to actually move fast. And if we have to move fast, how do you empower and enable the organization so that they are able to do certain things faster? The third myth is I want a single vendor solution.

I want to create it in-house. At this point in time, my suggestion would be be open. Look around. There are a lot of organizations doing a lot of stuff and you may not be able to solve every problem that you're thinking about with AI on your own or with one vendor solution. So be open and look around. The fourth myth that we see around is, free up people for higher value. Well, that is my anchor point.

Well, that could be true, but that may not always be true. We will use AI to free up our people to do higher value work, but that needs to be a process where you start with understanding what are you expecting these people to do in a go-forward world? What are the use cases that you're really trying to solve? Are these big enough pain points for you to invest your time and energy into?

And then the fifth myth is really around hire really senior experts. I will create a chief AI officer. Well, that's great, but it's almost like bringing in the leader and focusing all your energies and just getting this leader before you do anything. This space is moving so fast that there is an opportunity for organizations to really empower their people very quickly

to learn, get to a level where they are trying and testing with some of these use cases on their own so that they're able to solve and see the real values coming out of it. Yes, I would imagine that we would need leadership and the AI and organizations are already going in that direction because I'm already hearing that are like some of the top 10 companies

that have gone so far on this that they have problems around AI governance. People are rolling out solutions where they do not have a good understanding of what is getting rolled out and they feel like they may be in the scrutiny of regulators and whatnot. So you definitely need that level of expertise and whatnot

and get that senior leader to kind of come in. But let's not wait for that to be the step number one. So those are a few things that I would say those five myths that I would say like try to avoid and that would help. It's important to get started now. It's important to start playing and understanding what can AI do for us. It can apply to so many different areas of the business. It can help us to level up our employees, but there's a lot of implications on our businesses. And I think something that I would say to add to what you just shared is really aligning before we even dive in, really aligning on what are the values that we hold around AI?

How does this connect to our business? What is green light? What is red light? And how do we create clarity for everyone involved, everyone in the organization around how we are approaching AI and what it means for us? Because I think so often I see organizations just diving into it and they're like, oh cool, this can fix this and this can fix this. It's just a free for all. We need to create some structure. We need to create our sandbox, our own unique sandbox that everyone can play in because the opportunities are truly endless.

But without boundaries, one, creativity is actually stifled. Boundaries create creativity. It creates space for creativity. We know how far we can go. We don't have to question, is this right or is this wrong? Am I allowed to do this? Is my boss going to get mad? Let's create that clarity for people in the beginning. But these boundaries also help us avoid bad situations from happening that are going to

be deeply embarrassing and hinder your customer and employee experience, which as we've talked about today is so essential to business success. So Sujay, we're running out of time here and I'm so sad because I know we could go on forever about these topics. But I have two last questions for you. The first is, we ask all of our guests these questions. The first question I have for you is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand, a company, an organization

that left you impressed. What was that experience? I will talk about an experience which was not actually great, but I got impressed about one aspect of what that company did so well that even in that whole bad experience, I felt really good about this company that they're doing this thing right. I was recently traveling to one of the developing countries and we had a flight cancellation.

The flight cancellation turned into a focus at the airport where people were all over the place. You can imagine in highly populated developing countries, like it becomes even more of a problem because now people are worried about like, did they lose the money that they put in the airplane? This was coincidentally late at night. So people are thinking about, will I get hotel reimbursement?

Are they getting us the hotel? A lot of ambiguities across the board. Unfortunately, some of the customers took matters in their own hand. And they went about shouting at the air hostesses in the airplane. They started shouting at the folks who were trying to help them at the ticket reissuing gate. It was just so bad, Lauren.

With the level of humility, the level of calmness and composure with which these air hostesses and the ticket counter folks were taking care of these customers was overwhelmingly amazing. I was just thinking about like, what are these people going through? Unfortunately, these people were also not empowered to make big decisions. And this goes a little bit to I would like to say that it's like a bit of like a cultural construct of some of these countries, but it may not be. One way or the other. I've seen it in America as well.

You've seen it in America as well. There you go. There you go. So I do feel like these people were bending backwards. The employees are bending backwards to help, which is what impressed me. But at the same time, I was just wondering about like, I wish that these people were empowered to call security and get these customers out of the way. I was feeling so pathetic, even being a customer,

I suddenly started to feel like, you know what? I'll pay for my whole hotel. I'm feeling so bad about that lady who is being shouted at by this gentleman who is probably in his 40s, like looks like a corporate professional. Like, what are you doing? So much so that next day when I was flying back, I went up to the ticket counter. I thanked everybody.

I went to the air hostess, who one of the air hostesses was coincidentally sitting next to me, going back to his plane, or going back to the city where she was supposed to be, not as an air hostess, but as one of the passengers in the plane. And I got a chance to talk to her at length during this. I thanked her a ton, and she was like, this is the best compliment I could get after such a rough evening.

So there is something in there in my opinion around like how that company has done such an amazing job for these people to consider the organizational pride over their own pride in certain ways, right? Like sort of like in that moment, they sacrificed and then they represented the organization, but they also were not the best because they did not empower these people with the solutions that they should have in hand

to be able to make those decisions. So, that's one that comes to my mind. It's very recent. I really appreciate that example because I've been in that experience myself many times on very different airlines. And if the airline employees had fought back,

if they had shown up without respect for the company that they're working for and respect for the customer. We all know where that would have gone. It would not be pretty. It would have made a lot more pain. It would have honestly been a lot more expensive for the company. And I also really appreciate the point of empowerment. It is so important for us to empower employees to be able to solve these problems and to help mitigate all of the issues that we are facing or that the people on our teams will face. And so I appreciate that example because it really

highlights where it is important for leaders to focus on their employee experience. So as promised, I have one more question, and then we'll be done. What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I'll go back to the initial part of our conversation and I'm connected to value.

A lot of times customer experience, sadly so even in today's world is seen as in the organizations as like a fluffy topic. And there is an, these customer experience leaders, even in conversations with me, say that I can't work with this organization. They just don't understand the value. I feel that it is not the leader's problem.

It is their problem. They got to figure out a way to help in connecting this to value. Because they have an opportunity to think about how do I make it tangible enough? How do I make it relatable enough? And there are different constructs that work in different organizations. In some places, these are about anecdotal examples that help the leaders understand that in this moment, experience is what helped you save this major client.

Or in certain cases, some leaders process it based on a clear correlation between experience and monetary gains. So try to do that. Bring the solution that you wanna bring in, but connect it back to value. And if we can connect it back to value and always keep the value first

and experience as a means to getting to the value, I feel customer experience will get like more of a front seat in a lot of decision-making versus as an afterthought of making a decision and thinking about how do we make sure that we alleviate the bad experiences that this decision may create on the customers and employees. Customer experience or experience in general is a must-have, but it's the leader's job to communicate why that is. And value is really the connecting point there. So thank you so much CJ for coming on the show.

It's been such a wonderful conversation. I'm so excited about everything that we've talked about. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Lauren. Thanks so much for having me on the show. It was exciting and fun to kind of talk to you about this. So thank you.